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We’ve arrived: the nadir of the book. I’ve convinced no small amount of trusting, unwary souls to try this rollercoaster of a series. Every one found different characters and themes that appealed to them, but without fail they reported having difficulty with this stretch of pages. Why? Because it’s a fuckton of infodump about characters we’ve just been introduced to and don’t care about. Also, (even more) racism.

On the bright side, while previous posts in this series have taken thousands of words breaking down 30 pages of novel, here we’re going to be able to sail through nearly a hundred pages like it’s nothing.

Prepare yourselves for an experience I’m sure many of you are unfamiliar with: an old cis white man telling you his overconfident opinions about how and why the world works.

If you’re wondering why it’s been a little while since the last recap, it’s because this section requires a certain amount of mental steeling to face. Not because it is particularly more horrible than other parts of this book (though at points it is, because it revolves around The Worst Character), but because a great deal of it is very, very boring. Today we will be covering the less-boring part.

When last we left off, Lestat had suffered the death of his first love and his mother leaving to enjoy eternity as her own person and buried himself in the earth, only to be dug out by the much-lauded Marius. This will turn out to be among the worst things that has happened to Lestat in terms of effects on the rest of his unlife. We’ll get into that as we go, because I am not exaggerating when I say that Marius is emblematic of just about everything wrong with these books.

I talked about Gankutsuou’s handling of teen crushes on adults last week, but here’s a more extensive discussion on age-gap relationships with Dee and Caitlin: the ethical, the bad, and the normalizing. Oh, and the “that doesn’t actually fall under this pernicious problem.”

(I can’t believe I forgot to bring up Yuko/Watanuki, over which I still have the longest and most exhausted sigh).

We left off at a dire moment for Our Hero: the inevitable had at last come to pass, and Lestat’s first love Nicolas had immolated himself (with more than a touch of help from Armand). We return you now to that moment as things continue to get worse. Way worse, because we have to finally contend with The Worst Character in the flesh.

Summer is turning to fall, and so we return to those garbage vampires of my heart doing….actually, remember the World Tour part of Interview with the Vampire that was wisely cut from the film? Yeah, this is that again; except that Lestat is the Dashing Hero who actually knows a single scrap of something that he refused to tell Louis and…no. No, no. I can’t get into this yet. Now is not the time. But soon, dear readers. Very soon.